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Family


THE BIZARRE RELATIONSHIP OF A ‘WORK WIFE’ AND A ‘WORK HUSBAND’

The work marriage is a strange response to our anxieties about mixed-gender
friendships, heightened by the norms of a professional environment.

By Stephanie H. Murray

GraphicaArtis / Getty
February 7, 2023
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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our
editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
Sign up for it here.     

It started out as a fairly typical office friendship: You ate lunch together and
joked around during breaks. Maybe you bonded over a shared affinity for escape
rooms (or board games or birding or some other slightly weird hobby). Over time,
you became fluent in the nuances of each other’s workplace beefs. By now, you
vent to each other so regularly that the routine frustrations of professional
life have spawned a carousel of inside jokes that leavens the day-to-day. You
chat about your lives outside work too. But a lot of times, you don’t have to
talk at all; if you need to be rescued from a conversation with an overbearing
co-worker, a pointed glance will do. You aren’t Jim and Pam, because there isn’t
anything romantic between you, but you can kind of see why people might suspect
there is.



The term for this type of collegial relationship—work wife or work husband—has
become a feature of American offices. The meaning can be a bit slippery, but in
2015, the communications researchers M. Chad McBride and Karla Mason Bergen
defined a “work spouse” relationship as “a special, platonic friendship with a
work colleague characterized by a close emotional bond, high levels of
disclosure and support, and mutual trust, honesty, loyalty, and respect.” Other
scholars have argued that the connection actually sits somewhere between
friendship and romance. Although articulating exactly what makes work spouses
unique can be hard, individuals who have them insist that they are singular,
Marilyn Whitman, a professor at the University of Alabama’s business school who
studies the phenomenon, told me. But the language people use to describe this
bond is even trickier to explain than the nature of the relationship: Why would
two people who aren’t married or even interested in dating call each other
“husband” and “wife”?

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